The Glenn Miller Orchestra, originally founded in 1938, has carried on and ushered in new musicians and audiences in the intervening years. The orchestra comes to Elgin this weekend for a 3 p.m. show Sunday at the Blizzard Theatre at Elgin Community College.

Included on the bill is Chicago native and guest radio host announcer, Denny Farrell, one of only three announcers ever to be inducted into the Big Band Hall of Fame.

Nick Hilscher serves as music director of the Glenn Miller Orchestra and the male vocalist as well.

The orchestra disbanded when Miller joined the Army in 1942 and, while Miller did not return from the war, his music lives on through the Glenn Miller Orchestra which was reformed in 1956 by his estate.

Hilscher's role is to lead the band throughout the performance and emcee the show, he said.

About 80 percent of the music they perform is Miller's from his original library that was written for his band, he said.

"The way that we interpret that and the direction we play the music is under my charge as well," he said.

He discovered Glenn Miller and the swing era through the Jimmy Stewart movie "The Glenn Miller Story" when he was about 11 years old.

"I really liked the sound of the music and I asked my parents if I could get a cassette tape of Glenn's band," he said.

From that introduction, he discovered more singers like Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. A singer and pianist already, he was motivated to change his singing style to reflect his growing love for the old-style crooners.

While in college, he sent in a demo tape to the Glenn Miller Orchestra and was thrilled to get the chance to audition. He won the job in 1998, left in 2005 and returned in 2012 as music director.

He's happy to help introduce swing and big band music to a new generation. The original music is such that he doesn't have to update it much.

"There's so many things that the band has been doing for 70 years that there are a good number of things I don't have to touch too much," he said. "We play things very authentically. It's in that old style that the Glenn Miller Orchestra was doing during the big band era. We're keeping that tradition. We're moving forward certainly in the 21st century but we're staying very true to what the music is, and I think that has a really great appeal to people."

When he started in 1998, the audience was primarily of the Greatest Generation. Now, it's Baby Boomers and younger, he said.

"The variety of ages at our shows is way more diverse than when I first started out," he said. "That's good news for the Glenn Miller Orchestra, big band music and jazz music in general. That makes us happy."

Miller, a trombone player, was born in Clarinda, Iowa, and grew up in Colorado.

"His trombone playing was great, but not on the same level as say Tommy Dorsey, who was known for his trombone sound," Hilscher said. "His band was a real showcase of his expertise on the trombone. Glenn Miller was a great arranger and writer, and his band was always focused on not so much Glenn, but on the music and the arrangements that were written for that band.

"And they're very intricate and really interesting things. I think Glenn had a remarkable talent of taking his arrangers that would write these very interesting arrangements, and Glenn had a way of taking them and making them very user-friendly and appealing to the average listener. He had that remarkable talent to do that. And he was a really great businessman and as a result, he wound up having the most popular band in the big band era.

"He had all these No. 1 hits with this band, and the first gold record — 'Chattanooga Choo Choo' — was issued to Glenn in 1942. The band was in two motion pictures. That all happened because Glenn was very musically smart and also he knew how to run a band and knew how to run a business."

"We do a good bit of the big hits of the band, but we also throw in some things that are different — whether they be different things Miller's band was doing back in that time period or whether they be some things that are outside of the Miller repertoire — we might do a Benny Goodman song or we might do something from Charlie Barnet's Orchestra or Nelson Riddle's Orchestra. It varies from night to night. But the audience will hear the big hits. It's a really great show."